The wide spread availability of networked communication and information storage has brought many changes to the world. Much more information is stored and is easily available. However, the information, while useful, may not necessarily provide answers users seek. Often, the information may be related to the desired answer but may not provide the actual answer. Similarly, the answer is often included in the information but difficult to find.
Search engines, such as Internet search engines, have been in use for some time. Such search engines permit the user to form a search query using combinations of keywords to search through a web page database containing text indices associated with one or more distinct web pages. The search engine looks for matches between the search query and text indices in the web page database, and then returns a number of hits which correspond to URL pointers and text excerpts from the web pages that represent the closest matches.
Some Internet search engines analyze the context of terms in order to narrow the number of matches. For example, if a search query includes the words “yellow” and “pages,” a search engine may recognize that the phrase “yellow pages” has a particular meaning and it may therefore note that web pages including the phrase “yellow pages” may be a closer match than web pages merely containing the word “yellow” and/or the word “pages.”
Some application programs, for example, a word processor, may have a help tool that allows a user to enter a word or phrase and will display help topics containing that word or phrase, from which the user can make a selection.